Back when it was new, Windows XP was the worst thing imaginable—ask Ars readers.

It wasn't meant to be this way. Windows XP, now no longer supported, wasn't meant to be popular. For all its popularity and sustained usage, people seem to have forgotten something important about it: it sucked.

The Ars forums are a place for geeks to hang out and chat about tech, and especially in light of the hostility shown toward Windows 8, we thought it might be fun to take a look at how our forum dwellers reacted when first introduced to Microsoft's ancient operating system.

The biggest problem with Windows XP was that it was Microsoft's first operating system to feature Product Activation, the licensing system that tied product keys to hardware fingerprints. Gone were the days of buying one copy of the software and installing it on multiple machines. With Windows XP, every system would need its own copy.

When the first news of activation broke, in January 2001, the response from the enthusiasts of the Ars forums was immediate—and broadly negative. The decision to lock down Whistler, as it was then known, was decried as evil.

The consequences of the Product Activation decision were to be many and varied. First of all, it meant that nobody would upgrade to Windows XP. Digitali said that he would be "staying with Win2K." madmanX was similarly "perfectly happy with win2k pro."

Others had even more exotic plans. Claiming that Microsoft had "officially gone too far," mav.rc wasn't going to put up with it, even if it meant having to switch to Linux, BeOS—remember BeOS?—or even, "(gasp!)," buying a Mac.

"Microsoft will learn this lesson or live to regret it."

Lawsuits were expected, and the burden on Microsoft of supporting online activation was argued to be immense, with activation expected to knock down core network infrastructure due to the loads it would create. Jeremy Reimer (then going by the moniker Lord Baldrick) expected a "huge" backlash, betting that Microsoft would back down in the long run.

Some of the claims were remarkably prescient, just not in the way their posters expected. Painless suggested that "one of these days people won't upgrade any more." This turned out to be somewhat accurate... it's just that it's Windows XP, Product Activation and all, that they'd stick with.

Another notable prediction came from amani, who said that Microsoft would simply force people to upgrade by "refusing to support older versions of Windows." What we've learned since then is that even cutting support doesn't, in fact, force people to upgrade. That's precisely the problem Microsoft is now facing.

Enlarge/ This is what Windows XP actually looks like for those who, like myself, are fortunate enough not to have seen it for many years.

Product Activation wasn't the only thing Windows XP had going against it. It was, in the view of many people, monumentally ugly. The bright colors of the "Luna" interface led to it being swiftly labeled a "Fisher-Price" or "Teletubby" operating system.

"It looks like a Fisher Price toy" wrote Spinlock. tmf2 was no fan either. "I dislike the Fisher-Price desktop scheme named Luna or Lunatic, something like that." Kosmo defended the use of the Fisher-Price description as it was a "brilliant reference to [Windows XP]'s candy-assed GUI."

Even before Windows XP was launched, the operating system's defenders in the Battlefront were tired of the Fisher-Price label, but it continued unabated. Even longtime Windows fans like, er, myself were displeased with the bulging, pseudo-3D design that Windows XP introduced.

It's an enduring criticism, and yet, it's one that apparently had no resonance with the broader consumer market. PC users flocked to Windows XP in droves, and not only were they not turned off by the Luna theme, many of them actually appeared to like it. Subsequent operating systems wouldn't stick with Luna, with Windows Vista and 7 both going for something arguably even more over the top with fakery, albeit less colorful, with the Aero Glass theme. Plainly, it wasn't actually a problem for Windows XP's adoption.

It did, however, keep me on Windows 2000 until that was no longer tenable.

Traditional problems

A Windows release wouldn't be a Windows release without worries about compatibility, and Windows XP had a harder time than most in this regard. It was the destination not just for Windows 2000 and NT 4 users, but also many millions of people migrating away from Windows 98 and its legacy of DOS compatibility. Even a year after release, Windows 98 SE was recommended as the platform to go for if you were a gamer.

To this day, there are still people clinging on to Windows 98, even going so far as to produce new drivers for the ancient operating system in a bid to let modern software run on it (though that project appears to be largely abandoned now, having received its last code change in 2013).

On top of all these, there were those who didn't want Windows XP to succeed for reasons that are best described as absurd. Self-styled security expert Steve Gibson proclaimed that Windows XP would somehow bring about the end of the Internet, thanks to its integrated support for raw sockets.

Raw sockets allow app developers to send network traffic that either spoofs its origin, making it harder to trace back to the source, or is malformed in particular ways, which can be useful in provoking bugs. Gibson felt that equipping a consumer operating system with such a capability was dangerously irresponsible (quietly failing to mention that there was already Windows 98 malware that took advantage of raw sockets simply by bundling suitable drivers).

Surprisingly, the normally divided forum community was unanimous in its rejection of the raw sockets brouhaha, with Flying Jelly Attack Confectionery writing "I am no fan of MS, but I think he is taking this a little too far."

Windows XP was released, and the end of the Internet didn't actually happen. Evidence that Windows XP's raw socket access was harmful was notable only by its absence. For no particularly good reason, Microsoft did restrict raw sockets in Service Pack 2 in a number of ways, a move that inconvenienced software (such as excellent port-scanning tool nmap) that legitimately used raw sockets. It did literally nothing to hinder malicious software.

It all just goes to show, a lot of the things that might worry nerds and Ars readers may not be such a big deal for the computer-using public.

438 Reader Comments

Am I actually reading people claiming that XP was stable? Revisionist history, anyone?

XP Home was probably second to ME as far as crashes goes... and XP Pro was absolute garbage until well into SP1.

Just like game system launches, or MMO launches, every time this happens people act like it's the first time and it will be the end of all things... but it really is par for course. People remember what they want to remember, and they TRY to shove XP Home out of their minds, with good reason>

My Progression:95 --> NT --> 2000 ---> Vista ---> 7 ----> 8.1

I can't say I LOVED Vista, but I liked it a lot more than XP. Which, albeit, isn't saying much. I've been happy with 7 and 8.1 so far. I almost never shut down my computer, so I see the "dreaded Start Screen" about once every week or two when I need to reboot to install drivers or something. Everything I need is on my Taskbar.

I also find all the hate of Vista and all the love of 7 amusing. They're basically the same OS, only 7 has the Taskbar and is less secure because people were whining because for some reason they think having unused RAM is a good thing. (You know, the same people who thought killing their Android Apps and clearing their RAM saved battery life. Hehhe. Silly people.)[...]

Usually the 1st release of a Microsoft OS gets the bad press and subsequent service packs fix the mess. So depending on which service pack people happen to use, they will have different opinions of how truly good or bad they find it. Nobody talks about Windows 98 vanilla but usually mention 98SE for comparison sake. Similarly, you'd expect most XP users to know the SP3 experience and no longer remember how it was on day one.So comparing Windows 8.0 to XP SP3 may be a tad unfair... Maybe Win XP vanilla vs Win 8 vanilla would be a fairer comparison...

Personally I find Windows 7 x64 much more suitable than Vista x32 ever was. I upgraded from a custom built desktop running Windows 2000 to a Vista laptop and a lot of my favourite videogames started to act glitchy. Whether you consider Windows 7 as the ultimate service pack to Vista (which it was in essence) or as a standalone OS, it has worked much better straight out of the box for me than Vista ever did. But again your mileage may vary and perspective is everything.

I'm not fan if these new fancy operating systems. I'm sticking to my favorite, most stable operating system Microsoft has ever released. Yes, I'm a big fan of Windows ME. What a wonderful operating system for new millennium. Very stable, never cr

- Cost per machine per year to Microsft of maintaining XP is in the range of cents, to be compared to the 50-100$ they got when the machine was first installed (anyone got a better range of OEM price for windows ?). Of course this is due to the very high number of XP machines still running. Around 25% of the web, I am told.

With marketing incentives, it ranged from $0 to $40, clustering around $35. Information is sporadic and usually came from leaks or court cases.

Even if you could somehow justify the notion that it costs only cents per machine per year... when you consider that a huge percentage of the currently installed base is pirated, and the volume licensees are already paying for continued support anyway, you really have no argument. Yes, it would be magnanimous for Microsoft to give non-paying customers the benefits that paying customers pay for... but that's exceedingly rare, and they made their decision over six years ago; the world has had plenty of time to come to terms with that.

The idea that they're still a monopoly is laughable, they're only a monopoly as long as administrators don't want to support anything else, and businesses doesn't want to spend lots of money on training.

XP was just as bad at release as Vista. The biggest problem XP had at release is one the article doesn't mention... memory requirements. Win98 can run comfortably in 32MB. Win2K will give you a decent experience with just 64MB. WinXP at release would "install" if you had 64MB but needed 128MB to be "usable". If you actually wanted a decent experience you really needed 256MB(512MB for SP2). OEMs were selling 128MB XP boxes and people were downgrading them just like they did with 1GB Vista machines.

You could also block the loading of Win98, by like starting a DosNavigator or similar in the autoexec.bat. So you got the possibility to boot a DOS and play your older games there. No emulator required . And if a game required the windows environment, just quit DN and the GUI libraries loaded. This was not an option for XP, there was no real shell underneath it, so you had to go the more memory-consumption lane... and most of the dos games did not even work afterwords.

I stayed on Win2k until DirectX stopped supporting it. To be honest it was nothing more than hating Luna and a sense of nerd elitism.

It's no where close to the rage that Windows 8 and Windows 2012 (more so, it's a server!) give me. Every time that start screen disconnects me from my desktop or I struggle to find something that was two clicks away in Windows 7, have to take a breath. Charms bar? No thanks.

I'm open to embracing it though, especially with the incoming start menu. I just don't like having tablet paradigms forced on me on my 27" desktop.

The charms bar was the only part of 8 that I loathed -- on a dual-monitor system it was basically pixel hunting. 8.1 all but eliminates that as soon as you enter desktop mode, by placing all the important system tools on the start button right-click menu. (The rest of the time there are other paths to it, like the network icon, or it's already there when you need it.) Everything else just meant an adjustment in habits, though I'm still desktop-centric; clicking a desktop icon after my weekly reboot was no problem, and that's an option in 8.1 now too.

There's a surprising amount of irony, or idiocy, or... something, here in the comments section. People remember the misplaced doubts and hatred about XP, but then go on to promote the same sort of misplaced doubts and hatred about 8. Often in the same sentence.Go and have a quiet word with yourselves, people.

I stayed on Win2k until DirectX stopped supporting it. To be honest it was nothing more than hating Luna and a sense of nerd elitism.

It's no where close to the rage that Windows 8 and Windows 2012 (more so, it's a server!) give me. Every time that start screen disconnects me from my desktop or I struggle to find something that was two clicks away in Windows 7, have to take a breath. Charms bar? No thanks.

I'm open to embracing it though, especially with the incoming start menu. I just don't like having tablet paradigms forced on me on my 27" desktop.

The charms bar was the only part of 8 that I loathed -- on a dual-monitor system it was basically pixel hunting. 8.1 all but eliminates that as soon as you enter desktop mode, by placing all the important system tools on the start button right-click menu. (The rest of the time there are other paths to it, like the network icon, or it's already there when you need it.) Everything else just meant an adjustment in habits, though I'm still desktop-centric; clicking a desktop icon after my weekly reboot was no problem, and that's an option in 8.1 now too.

I have gripes, but less than with 7.

Right-click for quick access to the system tools was there since 8.0. 8.1 only re-introduced the start button.

I did stick to win2k until the very end, then I switched to Linux. It wasn't easy at the beginning, but I told myself that when I first learned to use Windows I did find formatting disks a hard task, as well as uncompressing files and going through a setup. I dual-booted Mandriva and Vista for a while, then I decided to remove Windows completely. Even at work, I'm one of the lucky persons who are allowed to use Linux. It's been 6 years since I first started using Linux and over 2 years I don't touch a Windows system at all, and I'm extremely satisfied with my choice. But yeah, lots of people put great effort in complaining, but never actually do anything to solve their issues and end up following whatever path they get put onto. That's true in the general case imo, not just in IT.

All I know is I'm going to have more work. MS needs to provide a $20 copy of Win 7 that's specially designed to perform an in place upgrade of XP if they *really* want to get rid of XP.

I think you misunderstand why people are still using XP. Yes, there are some tech unsavvy folks, but if you've bought a PC in the past decade, it would probably have come with a newer OS. I bet it's mostly big businesses and governments afraid to migrate their entire infrastructure.

I can't speak for every single department, but from experience I can say UK military and the NHS are both still mostly reliant on XP. They have an entire ecosystem of bought software that has to be recertified and tested to be safe with a new operating system, and have to completely upgrade everything seamlessly, which would cost billions of dollars of effort, easy.

The sad part is, by the time they've spent that and finally gone through the process, I bet Win7 won't have a huge amount of time left in support..

From what I remember, XP was a bit bloated and ran poorly on low-end systems.It was a bit unstable at release, compared to Win98SE.The 64-bit version was a broken mess.

It should also be noted that WinME was a terrible failure that added nothing except buginess. Win2K was for people who ran servers and not for regular people. XP was seen as a long-overdue upgrade.

I think that XP became well-liked after SP1. It fixed most of the instability and also some common viruses (the blaster worm hit me and a lot of people at a time when firewalls were uncommon on home PCs).Hardware had also caught up to the point where Win98SE was looking archaic.

Vista was hated because it ran like a dog on the hardware that the vast majority of businesses and home users had at the time. People like Dell were shoving Vista on computers that really weren't powerful enough.

Win 8 is unusual because it's not disliked for being slow. It's disingenuous to compare the Luna complaints (it looks like a kids toy) to the Win8 complaints (where did all the menus go, where are the options hidden, the switching between desktop/metro UIs).People liked how XP worked, they just didn't like the way it looked and how slow it ran. Vista had similar complaints (aero glass was trying too hard to look cool, at the expense of performance).If people were only complaining about Win8's stark interface, it would be comparable to XP. But people hate the interface design, not just what it looks like (and for the record, Win8's user interface does look horrible IMO).

Win7 was almost universally liked, since it delivered on what Vista promised. A cheap laptop could run it well, and in most cases an upgrade from Vista would increase performance as well as getting a few extra features that Win7 provided. The UI also looked good.

There's also the relativity of 'hate'. It means many things, which are rarely obvious from cherry-picked forum comments.Things I hate include broccoli, having to get up early for work, Nickelback, Hitler and Cancer. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to place XP and Win8 at varying points on this scale.

"Others had even more exotic plans. Claiming that Microsoft had "officially gone too far," mav.rc wasn't going to put up with it, even if it meant having to switch to Linux, BeOS—remember BeOS?—or even, "(gasp!)," buying a Mac."

Guys, this is precisely what I ended up doing.

Stayed with Win2K as long as I could (which was quite awhile. Usually there was some way to convince programs it was XP, then everything ran fine)Switched to Ubuntu Linux, then Mint.

Apart from the horrid activation and all the associated headaches it brought the thing I remember most is how sluggish it ran when installed on the "slightly older" hardware of the time which was the average for my clients but going back to the activation, god it was a pain in the ass! I had a few schools that did not have internet at the time and other clients that did not want their systems connected to it at all for various reasons and having to do activations on the phone for a few hundred machines really made my life quite miserable for a while.

Thankfully all this got lessened as people started upgrading to better hardware (For the time) and embracing internet as something useful and worth the money spent on it, by then performance was a non-issue and activations were easy enough that people got used to them as normal. (I'm not taking into account the effects it had on the industry over the years) That stability certainly makes it hard to convince some folks to upgrade since their computing need were aptly met with XP.

The only cases were upgrading to a newer OS is an easy sell for my non tech-inclined customers is when they want some hardware or software that XP can't properly support. The argument of security while valid and important is always kind of a hard sell to non tech-inclined customers unless they had trouble in the past with hacks or ID theft so MS has plenty of work to do to encourage that kind of customer to upgrade.

Lots of people never liked XP. For me, it was the first OS/GUI that really sacrificed form for function, wasting precious screen and computational resources for happy bubbly stuff. I understand the desire to make eye-candy for ma-and-pop users, but it felt like a step backwards for people who use computers to get things done. Sadly, i've said that about a lot of things as of late.... bah! Off my lawn!

I was fortunate to have a license of Windows 2003 Server, which I always considered the better XP. In fact it was a lot like Windows 2000, but with a newer kernel than XP. You had to trade the “disable Luna” for a click on “enable graphic acceleration”, but then again Win 2003 was already immune to the worm (was it ILOVEYOU? I don't remember) that affected XP at the time.

When I helped others installing Windows XP, the first thing I ran were tools like xpy, which free'd XP from lots of the hassle (and ugliness.)

My memories of Windows XP boil down to wiping the hard drive every 6 months and doing a clean install to solve registry clutter issues. I refused to use third-party registry cleaners, and the OS really did grind to a halt after a few months. One good thing that came out of it was that I learned to always have 2 partitions (system and data) and a folder with the installers for my most-used software always at hand. That way, I could format and reinstall in a couple of hours with no data loss.

I wonder why to this day Windows doesn't have something similar to a /user partition by default. It makes perfect sense to put My Documents and similar folders in a partition other than the system partition in case something goes wrong with the latter.

My memories of Windows XP boil down to wiping the hard drive every 6 months and doing a clean install to solve registry clutter issues. I refused to use third-party registry cleaners, and the OS really did grind to a halt after a few months. One good thing that came out of it was that I learned to always have 2 partitions (system and data) and a folder with the installers for my most-used software always at hand. That way, I could format and reinstall in a couple of hours with no data loss.

I wonder why to this day Windows doesn't have something similar to a /user partition by default. It makes perfect sense to put My Documents and similar folders in a partition other than the system partition in case something goes wrong with the latter.

Actually I always did do that precaution myself in retrospect, and still do.And your memory is better than mine, yes the registry abuse was awful.

To this day, there are still people clinging on to Windows 98, even going so far as to produce new drivers for the ancient operating system in a bid to let modern software run on it (though that project appears to be largely abandoned now, having received its last code change in 2013).

It's funny how fast I reset the xp theme back to w2k mode. Anyhow, xp became usable after sp2. It became good with sp3. I tried to like vista. I couldn't. I liked windows 7 and I love windows 8 after .1 update. Microsoft, thanks for all the memories.

I still prefer the flat grey theme from Win2K over the XP 'Fisher Price My First Start Bar' that was the default theme of WinXP back in the day. Never had a problem with the underpinnings in the era of 32-bit x86 CPUs, and appreciated the improved DirectX support, but ditched XP the day I went x86_64....

Every install of XP I did, I set the Classic menu and visual style. Saved a lot of grief for business users who were already used to how Win98 looked. If I could get the theming that I want on W8, I'd be marginally happier with it.

To this day, there are still people clinging on to Windows 98, even going so far as to produce new drivers for the ancient operating system in a bid to let modern software run on it (though that project appears to be largely abandoned now, having received its last code change in 2013).

Jesus christ, that is beyond horrifying.

But true. I know of one crowd who's crash simulation software (which has featured in some high profile court cases), only runs on '98. Still.

I wonder why to this day Windows doesn't have something similar to a /user partition by default. It makes perfect sense to put My Documents and similar folders in a partition other than the system partition in case something goes wrong with the latter.

Microsoft's guidelines for developers have said that you should use the user profile and user portion of the registry for years - since at least the late 90's.

There are three reasons why this isn't done:1. Legacy code bases that do otherwise still work. Microsoft's investment in backwards compatihbility is insanely effective. Heck, Vista even introduced an entire "virtual filesystem" to allow programs to write to the Program Files folder safely, yet not actually modify it. This is counterproductive though - the app still works, so why should the developer follow the guidelines?

2. The multi-user profiles system didn't exist in Windows until Windows NT, which would be about 1993. Windows 95 had no user profiles, and I think the Windows 9x/ME stream introduced them with 98 or 98SE - and they were quite cut down compared to the Windows NT profiles. For a lot of consumer software, there was no market for profiles-aware products until everyone started using Windows XP. And as everyone ran as Administrator there anyway, there was no penalty for not doing it...

3. In the early days, Microsoft were amongst the worst offenders for not following their own guidelines. For example, when Windows 95 came along, the message was clear - whilst you could put stuff in the root of the Start Menu, you shouldn't. It's bad. To keep things clean, please put your app's shortcut in a folder. Then along comes the Office team, who... put all their shortcuts in the root of the Start Menu. When the vendor of the platform can't convince its own developers to follow interface and programming guidelines, why should anyone else?

These three things combine to create a nasty situation, and I doubt it will change until every Windows app is a TIKFAM app (where these things are actually more strongly enforced by the platform anyway).

Lets go back even further to when Windows 95 came out. If you guys think people hate Windows 8, you haven't seen anything. I wish I had some old FIDOnet forums archived from that era. People were losing their shit over Windows 95, predicting the end of the personal computer, etc.

What I've learned is that in nerd zealot wars, most of the people are up to their eyeballs in BS. I'd put money on at least 50% of the people here who claim "I don't run Windows 8 and never will!" probably are running Windows 8 and are looking for "hardcore nerd cred".

Me? I'm loud and proud, I love Windows 8 (especially 8.1). Just like I loved 95, and XP, and Vista (yeah, I loved Vista, sue me) and Windows 7.

Lets go back even further to when Windows 95 came out. If you guys think people hate Windows 8, you haven't seen anything. I wish I had some old FIDOnet forums archived from that era. People were losing their shit over Windows 95, predicting the end of the personal computer, etc.

What I've learned is that in nerd zealot wars, most of the people are up to their eyeballs in BS. I'd put money on at least 50% of the people here who claim "I don't run Windows 8 and never will!" probably are running Windows 8 and are looking for "hardcore nerd cred".

Me? I'm loud and proud, I love Windows 8 (especially 8.1). Just like I loved 95, and XP, and Vista (yeah, I loved Vista, sue me) and Windows 7.

Maybe here they were loosing their minds over 95, but out in the real world people were actually waiting for it. It sold retail in volume (even allowing for the channel stuffing going on). Since when has a consumer OS done that? (I think probably not before or since, and I'd be interested to see the retail sales trend over the years).

I am also running Windows 8 and somewhat unhappily so. I slightly less unhappily also run CentOS.To date I think NT4, XP, and Win 7 would have been my favorites, and I have liked pretty much all of them bar WinMe and Vista (which I was especially unhappy about, bordering on disbelief that it actually shipped as was at the time).

I've been in the computer industry basically forever, and have used every version of Windows since last time it didn't allow overlapping windows (Version 1.0). In terms of user interface, Windows hit its peak with Windows 2000. Every subsequent version, prior to 8, I've kept a cheat sheet on things to toggle to recreate Win2K as closely as possible. Windows 8 largely broke that practice, so I don't use it.

IMHO, an operating system should be largely invisible - a platform to run application software, move files around, handle I/O, and otherwise keep to itself. I'll pick my own web browser or media player, thanks. Last several revs of MS's "operating system" have been more like an amusement park.

To this day, there are still people clinging on to Windows 98, even going so far as to produce new drivers for the ancient operating system in a bid to let modern software run on it (though that project appears to be largely abandoned now, having received its last code change in 2013).

Jesus christ, that is beyond horrifying.

But true. I know of one crowd who's crash simulation software (which has featured in some high profile court cases), only runs on '98. Still.

I think its fairly apparent that XP was fine, if it really fundamentally failed as an OS there is no way it would have lasted as long as it did. The interface had to change, grey on grey of 2k/NT is not exactly clear or personal is it? The problem was they made it too restrictive, and should have realised that people liked being able to change the colours of their systems, and not make them hack dll's about.

Drivers have always been a problem (in any OS!), and tbh I'm not sure how much can really be blamed on MS here...the 'just buy this years model' mind-set had already set in for most of the peripheral vendors.

For me 64bit killed XP, and I went to, the actual fail that was, Vista (which I think failed not because it was bad, but because it wasn't what was promised (that file system WinFS, still sounds perfect for the general pc usage)). I've now got 7 on my laptop (but only because I'm not paying £99 for an OS upgrade), but my main desktop runs 8.1 and its <5s boot from cold time.

I totally agree. Windows 2000 was the most stable and usable edition of Windows. If it was still supported and software would run on it, I'd still be using it. Windows 8 looks more like a Fisher-Price toy than a computer OS. Windows 9 may look like an arcade game if this keeps up.

I've been in the computer industry basically forever, and have used every version of Windows since last time it didn't allow overlapping windows (Version 1.0). In terms of user interface, Windows hit its peak with Windows 2000. Every subsequent version, prior to 8, I've kept a cheat sheet on things to toggle to recreate Win2K as closely as possible. Windows 8 largely broke that practice, so I don't use it.

IMHO, an operating system should be largely invisible - a platform to run application software, move files around, handle I/O, and otherwise keep to itself. I'll pick my own web browser or media player, thanks. Last several revs of MS's "operating system" have been more like an amusement park.